There Is No Plan

The Arab Spring is giving way to a rather uncertain winter. In Egypt, the Brotherhood is bubbling, the Army is busy containing, and the people are getting restless for the change promised by the departure and trial of Mubarak. In next door Libya, the echo of the bullet that liberated the rebels from the world’s most bizarre pariah of a dictator will soon give way to reality. A fractious and bloody civil war is almost certain to ensue in this colonial afterthought of a country, that’s never known anything but a lunatic totalitarianism.

In the vacuum of Gaddafi’s death the tribal, factional power-grab will be a nasty affair, made worse by the release of a powerful Islamist faction, the rise of tribal and city militias, a split between East and west, deep distrust of collaborators, a thirst for revenge, a big pot of black gold, and a strategic position just to the south of very vulnerable Southern Europe. NATO is gone in a few days, and the Libyans will be left to their own devices, their only support being the stirring and useless rhetoric of democratic idealism. They badly need a national army but won’t get one for decades. Without a cohesive national force to rely on, securing Western oilfields will be tough sledding and the Islamists will take full advantage of that weakness to impoverish and destabilize Libya, so Allah can pick up the pieces and give succor to a disheveled and desperate population. Read the rest of this entry »

When this stuff is pricey, dictators watch out.

And it always has been.

Napoleon’s famous adage that an Army marches on its stomach applies to something else he knew a little something about – popular revolt. Indeed, a brief scan of the French Revolution might be more than a little prescient as Egypt settles in for calamitous disappointment.

Simply put, the story goes like this.

While it was the gifted thinkers of the bourgeoisie in France that framed and drove the conflict with the monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy, it was the energizing of the mob that turned the slow and enlightened march to reform into an irresistible and uncontrollable surge, starting from the Siege of the Bastille in 1789.  And what triggered the rage of the urban poor? Astronomical bread prices brought on by disastrous harvests and cynical price controls. For the Sans-Culottes on the streets of Paris spending 80% or more of one’s meager day wages on bread meant slow starvation. So a sheet of musket fire was hardly something to be feared. Read the rest of this entry »

I just fired Hos. Anyone want to be Prez?

In hindsight, Mubarak was done the moment the police lost control. Mubarak could only truly count on the police, and when his attempt to use them to retake the square fell flat a couple of weeks ago, it was only a matter of time before he looked to the Army for protection.

Suleiman wasn’t going to allow Mubarak to take the whole shooting party down, but Hosni begged for time, and Suleiman agreed to try and wait out the demonstrators. The demonstrators responded by realizing they were being penned in the square, regrouped, reinforced and threatened to break out.

After rumors (sourced perhaps from the US but also maybe internally) started to swell that Mubarak was on his way built on the streets, Suleiman told Mubarak to obfuscate and confuse in one last vain attempt to keep him in power, but the demonstrators were having none of it. As the mood turned ugly, there were only two ways to return the country to stablility, fire on the crowd or sacrifice Mubarak.

And so he went.  It all happened, very, very fast. Read the rest of this entry »

Liberation Square is actually becoming an open air prison to contain ideas.

Tahrir Square is starting to turn into a city within a city. It has its own pharmacist, food and power supplies, and makeshift police forces drawn from protestors. The military oversee entrance into the square, politely frisking protestors and sending them on their way to merrily pray and sing their hearts out.  Slowly but surely, the military will choke the life out of the rebellion, killing it with kindness rather than water cannon.

All this is rapidly becoming almost laughably ironic.

Instead of taking the revolution on the road and fomenting pressure for change in Alexandria and  other poor as all get out delta cities, it has been voluntarily contained. The pitched battles in Suez and other cities seem to be over. The police have gone underground again, and world journalists are now conveniently camped out in Tahrir, where they’re surrounded by the military.

Meanwhile, the US has signaled it supports a Suleiman-led ‘transition’ government, which means – as predicted – the military is asserting its authority and Mubarak will get to pass the mantle, painlessly, to the Army, which is banking the worldwide hashtag creators will move on to the next story during that ‘transition’. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you sure you people want to do this democracy thing?

Let’s have some fun.

Time to look at the prognosis for the major characters…

Hos Mubarak;

the embattled President and friend to the West, currently looking for cheap tickets out of Cairo on a variety of Internet travel sites. He’s said he won’t run for “re-election” in September, but the street wants him gone now. Cue power vacuum.

The Army:

Never looked better. Despite the fact that they’ve never won a single battle of any note, their F-16s, M-1 Tanks and new uniforms sure are shiny. And get this, all the protesters love them. With Mubarak on his way out, and the Army elevated to cabinet power by the old man, it’s no surprise that they’ve pre-emptively said they won’t fire on the demonstrators if Mubarak as a last ditch effort to stay in power should ask them. That pretty much seals it for old Hos. With the toys and the status, the Army has everything to lose from the “Arab Revolutionary Spirit” in Tahrir Square. What they’re looking for is something akin to the power enjoyed by the Turkish Army during and after Attaturk. Are they going to get it? Not without a fight. What they’re not looking for is a resumption of hostilities, cold or otherwise, with Israel. That would spell the end of the gravy from the US, which would not take kindly to the unwholesome possibility of US weaponry being used against the Jewish state. Read the rest of this entry »

As Cairo explodes, it’s worth looking more closely at Pakistan for one potential trajectory that Egypt could take. Pakistan is deeply unstable, an impoverished nation torn asunder by clashes between militancy, the middle class, the army and a ruling elite.

The similarities between the two nations is quite striking.

Both Egypt and Pakistan…

…were born out of British colonial rule.

…are intensely religious states.

…have an educated elite with limited political power.

…have spent decades surpressing and appeasing their Islamic militants.

…share a border with a militarily powerful state with whom they have an uneasy peace.

…are seen as strategic lynchpins in the worldwide fight against Islamism.

…are dominated by their armies, which are the source of political power in the country.

…have limited natural resources and rely greatly on aid (Egypt’s tourism gives it the edge)

…have profound levels of poverty that no government can fix in anything like an acceptable period of time.

…have or will have weak civilian governments.

Does all this mean that Egypt will become as unstable as Pakistan? Read the rest of this entry »

There’s nothing the social media and tech mavens like doing more than talking up social media and its influence.

In Iran, that influence turned out to be overplayed, and the ‘Green Revolution’ fizzled out. But in Tunisia and Egypt, it seems like it did indeed play a major organizational role, at least in catalyzing the original clashes. The Iranian police state proved itself much more adept at manipulating social media for its own ends. Plus it had the added advantage of dealing with a rebellion that was bourgeois in origin. The Egyptian riots seem to have a far wider social base, which may prove to be crucial. It’s interesting to note that in both Tunisia and Egypt, satellite cities away from the capital played a big role in fomenting the rebellion.

But regardless of the social pattern, it’s clear to Thereisnoplan that the internet is a crucial part of the equation in Egypt, which explains why it was cut off. Washington has been watching closely, but I’m guessing that Beijing has been taking note too.

China has overheated its economy pretty nicely. A real estate bubble, a more educated, and connected population with vastly increased expectations, inflation levels near the tipping point, and a depressed international consumer economy are adding real pressure for political change. And while China’s conciliatory approach to human rights and democratic change is probably just talk, unlike their distaste for the current Nobel Peace Prize recipient – they’re getting closer and closer to a time when concrete decisions will have to be made. Read the rest of this entry »

All this talk of “[insert term for revolution here] revolution” in Egypt is a tad premature, and seems to gloss over the apparently incongruous fact that the Army were welcomed into the streets by the protesters. Cheering when the troops get called out is hardly the stuff of the barricades.

The Egyptian moment is moving very, very fast, but it is starting to become increasingly clear that Mubarak’s future is in the hands of the Egyptian military, which is much revered in highly nationalistic Egypt (and in which every young man serves).

So with that in mind, let’s extrapolate what this could mean for Cairo.

Mubarak has a major problem. The moment he asks the Army to fire on the protesters is the moment he books his ticket out of Cairo. The Army’s own credibility and continued power rests on it NOT doing that. The protesters know this and with the brutal and hated police thoroughly routed, it looks like we’ve arrived at stage two of the game. The ball is in the Army’s court. Read the rest of this entry »

See you around, Hos.

Before we get carried away with the birth of democracy in Egypt, let’s ask ourselves why the United States has been plying the Mubarak regime with a couple of billion dollars worth of play money for the last God knows how long. Was it because he was such a great guy doing right by his peeps? Uhh, no. Could it have been because we needed him to keep the lid on the Muslim Brotherhood, that’s been threatening to give the West indigestion for the last eighty years? Way more likely.

So where exactly have the Muslim Brotherhood been during the riots in Cairo and other cities around the Nile Delta? Not in huge evidence that’s for sure. And that’s what worries Thereisnoplan. You see, it would seem like a smart move for the Brotherhood to stay on the sidelines. After all, if they were seen as stirring the pot, the US and others might be a little less likely to be pushing the Democratic agenda for Egypt, just in case Cairo went the way of Gaza after its Democratic experiment and ended up in the hands of the Islamists. It may be a genuine secular revolt, but – and this is just a wild guess – Thereisnoplan is betting that much of President Obama’s trip to the White House basement (otherwise known as the Situation Room) was spent chatting about just that eventuality. Read the rest of this entry »

don't fumble my legacy, dude

Among all the other total disasters Bush is handing over to Obama is the small matter of finding peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the current attacks on Gaza are part of an old school of thought. The future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have a completely new landscape.

Benny Morris, a prominent historian of Israeli History wrote a superb primer on Israel’s current predicament in the New York Times. To sum it up, Israel faces unconventional enemies in both Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza, as well as the looming threat of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and the demographic ticking time bomb of the increasingly radicalized and fast growing Arab-Israeli population that is likely to outnumber the Israeli Jews by 2040 or 2050. Read the rest of this entry »